“Making All Content, Has Drained The Meaning Of Content Entirely”

Continued from Beatnik Cowboy Letters

CHRIS BUTLER: My knowledge of Amazon goes only so far, as I have refused to dive too deep into the belly of the beast. But, clearly you and I both know enough about them to keep them at a safe distance.

But yes, I have extensively studied the history of propaganda for years inside and outside of the classroom, especially the reigns of Goebbels and Bernays and the Cold War era of Soviet and American imperialism of ideologies and the many domestic Red Scares after both world wars. But WWI was certainly where it was utilized to such a massive scale as to move millions out of their homes and onto the battlefield or factories. Those who utilize it today seem to prefer the terms “alternative facts” or “distorted truths”. But I did not know that there was an actual designed attempt to move the center of art in the Western world from Paris to New York (considering one of the city’s most iconic symbols is a piece of French art). You learn something new…but the glorified idea of manifest destiny has been ingrained into the minds of Americans as not only grand, but necessary. And it seems to have continued to genetically or socioeconomically spread to all facets of the fringe’s lives. But considering what mass amounts of people are willing to believe, or blissfully ignore, it can be easy to travel down a rabbit hole and end up in an echo chamber of our own biases, allowing us to more easily digest misinformation. We are all indoctrinated at an early age to have inherent biases, mostly by our parents, whether they be negative or positive or whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Being aware of them and working to maintain the good and deprogram the bad from your subconscious self is a lifelong process for most, but diligence is key to remain as objective as possible. But I completely agree, media literacy is in a continuous downward spiral, but that may be contributed to by the number of people with access to the information of the internet today compared to those who could actually read a book when the printing press came into existence. The vast choices of information is just too much and causes a malaise with most, as it does in consumerism. And I completely agree regarding your words concerning the world and it seemingly changing since 2016, and the epidemic of white nationalism (it’s a theme in that novel I’ve been trying to write lately, so I have studied it a bit too much for any insane brain to handle). However, I believe these feelings have always been there, going back to the belief that Americans have been blessed by the one true god to fulfill their “manifest destiny” at any cost, ignoring that the vast majority of those who moved west in the 1800s were criminals or charlatans escaping the laws, or justice for crimes committed, in the American territories. The perpetuation of this false narrative has led to nearly two centuries of American exceptionalism. So sadly, I believe that this vitriolic hate and prejudice has been there for quite some time, and it’s not just since 2016 that people believe that spouting hatred is their “freedom of speech” or “freedom of expression”. At least since that foul year of some lord, these folks have certainly helped us and others to learn who their neighbors really are, because they decided to openly advertise it with the colored hats they wear, the flags they wave and their postings on social media. This obsession with race, which I agree is a social construct and not biological (eugenics was dismissed long, long ago as a false science), as well as illiberalism, has also spread to other Western nations for a variety of reasons. Not to be cliched, but yeah, there is only one race. The human one.

I have collaborated with other poets, including co-writing several poems and a book of poems with Randall, editing several poems from writers soliciting my input, and appearing in anthologies (I’ve lost track of how many at this point). My poems “covered” on YouTube include three that a publisher, Scars Publications, uploaded at a few open mic nights, but they also include two poems that an older female poet from Chicago uploaded with her reading them because she liked them, she said. So I suppose I have encountered other poets whose sensibilities are similar to my own, or at least formed a connection through periods of interpersonal communication. There are plenty of poets who I could say with the utmost sincerity are worth reading whenever you come across a piece of their art, aside from the famous names who everyone already knows. One of the benefits of being an editor is becoming a fan of some fine writers.

But what about your work? It’s been all about mine so far. Have you published enough material for a book? Is that something you would be interested in doing? And if so, are you going to submit only to the paying presses?

You’ve mentioned a few times that you write poetry geared towards specific sites. How successful have you been in approaching writing that way? I’ve never written a poem for a specific publisher, but have had countless times when one specific publisher came to mind once its final form was identified.

But reverting back to YouTube for a quick tangent, it’s all about that algorithm…it really rules over the entire site. However, YouTube’s recent tirade and crusade of censorship and demonetization has pushed many great creators off of the platform and onto sites like Patreon, because of the lack of censorship, their basic understanding of proper fair use and more dollars that can be made for the same content. I completely agree with your sentiments regarding how it’s changed over the years. There were a few directors who ended up making it all the way to Hollywood off of the short films they made and put on YouTube (mostly all in the horror genre, because it’s cheap and makes money), but as I’ve come to see, more creators are struggling to navigate to the inane censorship towards any “controversial” topic. The ones who are really hurting at the moment are the history channels, as anything related to violence and war is apparently too much for the below average person to handle. It seems as if it will soon be the second or third option for creators to post their content onto for an additional fiscal stream. At least that’s the information I’ve been fed from the position of an outsider looking in.

I agree with your sentiments towards the artificially inflated art world (it makes me sad when I think of Van Gogh dying broke while his paintings are appraised for a value equivalent GDP of the 2nd world country) and the bubble has been stretching itself close to the point of bursting since the end of the fallout of the Great Recession. But some become famous, and some are infamous, and sometimes there is no distinction between the two. The culture around celebrity is a strange one, where delusions of undeserving grandeur from the public can occur. I guess some people need that connection to someone on the stage or screen who will never know them. I don’t.

I should note that my figure regarding the small percentage of publishers worth one’s while is based primarily on personal experience of searching and discovering a vast pool of potential publications over years to submit to (a significant are automatically disqualified due to defined prerequisites or submissions restrictions), along with my personal belief that a small percentage of art itself is also worth one’s while, and they include the ones that aren’t promoted for “mass consumption”. But that is more of an issue of quantity over quality (“throwing something at the wall to see what sticks”, as you put it). And it applies to all mediums of art: film, music, poetry, fiction, paintings, etc. But the focusing of investment in “art” which has a higher chance of producing a profit will unfortunately take precedent over art with merit that is a financial risk (except in the rarest of circumstances, such as when one has a previous track record of financial success). It is ultimately a business. You are right though that this practice and philosophy floods the marketplace with disposable art, making it harder to discover and invest in the indispensable art.

But I’m not defending the publications who only accept solicited manuscripts. But I am blessed with the curse of empathy, so I can understand why some journals have this practice, but not why others have it (maybe they believe it makes themselves more exclusive and prominent that they are so selective, but I think it completely limits their ability to find new writers). But some journals don’t list their response times, but this doesn’t mean it takes forever. Some will get back to you within a reasonable time frame, or surprisingly quickly (within a few days). However, it can be a crap shoot, or you can be pleasantly surprised by a quick reply and publication. This sometimes requires a little more time investment to find the right publishers, such as seeing how often they post (or when they published their last post) and whether or not poets you are familiar with are published there (also reading writer’s bios can introduce you to other publishers that have recently published them that you may not have heard of that have similar guidelines). Submitting is always a gamble, but there are ways to increase your odds.

In regards to representation, I agree us freelance writers need direct participation in having their interests. What you are suggesting is quite similar to the Dutch system of Watershappening, in which all members of society were consulted regarding the building a ducts, dikes, dams and waterways across the Netherlands (although this system no longer exists as originally intended, with the select few decision makers at the top of the pyramid having removed the populace from the process). I fear an issue with this is the misconception of your average member of the population (I just watched a documentary about it yesterday, so all apologies for the random example). Much like the differences between Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, communism and socialism, there are significant differences between the fundamental principles which constitute different democracies (as the American, the Roman Republics are based on a select few elite representatives making the ultimate decisions for the masses, as they’ve believed since the reign of the Roman Senate that the vast majority of the populace is incapable of making such informed and educated decisions on their own). And of course the greatest problems arise when those representatives fail to keep their campaign promises and act against the best interest of their constituents, almost always for personal profit and/or power.

I also could never advocate for “write what you know” as an “inviolable law”, as most writers don’t have such dramatic life experiences that would lead to a story worth telling (although, you would be surprised by the number of people I know who have asked me to “write their life story”). I have also known several writers who sent me their in-process autobiographies, and I even fell victim to writing such a manuscript in my mid-20’s, because I had many dramatic life experiences which others have previously fictionalized with success, but I abandoned it once the dramatic existence that has been my thirties became too unbelievable for any autobiography. Years ago I ventured down those worn roads of the token plots that you listed (that script I wrote at 14 was a story about cops and robbers, I wrote a short story in high school about a hitman on his last night of work, and even attempted a novel where I tried to create “the perfect villain” as the main character, but after months of research that project died a quick death before I could truly begin writing it). In retrospect, those certainly weren’t stories that needed to be told. At least you are aware of these narrative trappings before you make the mistake of wasting what precious time one is afforded.

But yeah, I agree. If one seeks to secure approval or confirmation from society at large for their art, they may be waiting a long while for nothing at all, and their priorities over their life and legacy may need be in need of some deep reflection. The best we can do is write the best we can, and hope someone out there likes it. And the best thing we can do as writers is just keep writing and not stop until the ink in the pen of life has dried up. And yes, life is more important than art. There can’t be art without life, but there can be life without art, although it’s not necessarily a life I would enjoy living.

While having optimism and utopian ideals is an important aspect to living a happy and healthy life with happy and healthy relationships, I also can’t bring myself to fall for those pseudo-science “power of positive thinking” and the endless uses of cliches in every self-help book. But I think what is keeping people from fully imagining a world different from this one is people’s lack of will or inability to change. The status quo is the path of least resistance, and the will to change can only come from resisting to such established norms.

The structural analogies between film and poetry is not something I’ve really ever thought about. But the time I moved into the realm of poetics, I was a few years removed from the film industry. Although, Bukowski’s influence on this and last couple generations of writers (there are so many poets who write exactly like him that he is certainly the biggest influence on western poetry since the Beatniks) has shown that poetry can be successful in a more narrative form (he did write himself a movie right after he hit the mainstream in the 1980’s). But that would be something I would need to further analyze. It’s an interesting correlation to consider.


A SCOTT BUCH: I find Amazon like many other corporations, detestable for how they brand themselves, and attempt to come across, with a progressive sheen, when being in reality anti-union. The story of Chris Smalls who struggled to create the first Amazon Union, strikes me as a very important political development in recent times that many should celebrate, be aware of, and support.

You’re right that certain structures or concepts can remain, in this case, propaganda or disinformation, but go by different wordings, such as modern instances of “alternative facts” or “distorted truths.”

Don’t take my word that there was espionage involved in fields we wouldn’t assume it would exist in, the art world, for instance. Yet I can assert it is documented that espionage of this nature did happen, for instance in attempting to create what is known as soft power for the US over the Soviet Union, and of course the Soviet Union did it too. I think an uncontroversial example is how the work of George Orwell was artificially propped up by the CIA for his artful and scathing critiques of Stalinism. I believe it is alleged the career of Jackson Pollock was artificially inflated to try to brand his work as particularly exemplary of how free the United States was in its cultural life. I even remember coming across a non-fiction work which alleged that Ernest Hemingway had worked both for the OSS and the NKVD, the precursors to the CIA and KGB. (We forget there was a time the Soviet Union and United States were aligned to defeat Nazi Germany.) Going back as far as Manifest Destiny however, that is quite far into history. Clearly that ideology was a contributing factor to genocide and colonialism. If I’m not mistaken it would often use a symbol of Lady Columbia, to represent a continuation of what the original land theft and forced enslavement of indigenous folks by Christopher Columbus was branded as, “discovery,” and divinely sanctioned. People would have certainly been in their own bubbles and rabbit holes back then although obviously the cliché “rabbit hole” hadn’t been coined yet, and it would’ve been more restricted to old media forms like print newspapers and the like.

“We are all indoctrinated at an early age to have inherent biases, mostly by our parents, whether they be negative or positive or whether we are consciously aware of them or not.” When we consider it psychoanalytically, the phenomenon of indoctrination, I would assert is always negative. Psychologically, we are unquestionably shaped by our parents, but their psychologies have also been shaped, so that I think the original shaping mechanism is culture and society. This leads to an important question: Must all culture and social formations be of their nature “indoctrinatory”? The definition of indoctrination to me seems to hinge on its subconscious transference and, an essential nature of being compulsory or authoritatively enforced. So that to me I think a form of cultural formation and transmission which was consciously creative, and free, open, voluntary, could in theory be posed as a positive alternative to such a form of status quo.

“Being aware of them and working to maintain the good and deprogram the bad from your subconscious self is a lifelong process for most, but diligence is key to remain as objective as possible.” This is correct, in terms of being like a “cure” for the original infliction. An interesting question to consider, related to the project that radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich devoted his life to, is, if we are stuck only being able to cure the infliction. When rather couldn’t we in theory prevent it from being inflicted?

“. . . media literacy is in a continuous downward spiral, but that may be contributed to by the number of people with access to the information of the internet today compared to those who could actually read a book when the printing press came into existence.” My take would be that having information at our finger tips, can have the paradoxical effect of making us less media literate, because we can become lazy regarding truth-confirming or truth-producing processes, becoming dependent more on typing up quick the answer to everything on the ubiquitous everything device.

“The vast choices of information is just too much and causes a malaise with most, as it does in consumerism.” Yes. I see it as often contributing, like a bludgeon, to make us more docile. As it contributes to an overwhelming atmosphere; one in which it becomes easier to not think.

Right on! taking on work that is Anti-Fascist. Tough work that needs pacing because it can become very fatiguing and hard to stare down certain abysses, that need stared down. Wisely, we can come to see deep historical roots to modern phenomenon. Fascism seems to come with an attendant form of racial or national mysticism, that also sees violence as justified for the sake of fulfilling a divine plan. A lot of psychoanalytical problems contributing to political problems, even in the form of information overload, I reckon, could be mitigated by philosophy, or careful attempts at demystification. What’d be nice is if such techniques would get passed down to others as a new form of common-sense, as I believe David Graeber once talked about how revolutions are often at their core a revolution in common-sense.

We can find deep historical roots to 2016, but also at the same time, think of how different, say, the era which we grew up in was. The 80s/90s was VERY different from 2016-2024, and yet, I fear many of our generation still desire to live in those times. Or that sometimes people seem still to behave as if we were living in those times, or those of the early 2000s (which were already getting bad after 9/11), when times have utterly changed. This strikes me as one of the reasons culture is so stagnated in being only able to repeat all the old stuff from the past and capitalize on a feeling of nostalgia perhaps in taking advantage of how uncertain the future is.

Co-writing poetry seems interesting! Never thought of it before, but now it seems like, yes, that is valid for all other writing, so why not for poetry. If you’ve lost track of being featured in anthologies, that is phenomenal! I’d hope there would be a lot of content on YouTube of the reading of poetry. My experience with poetry up to this point has been mostly the direct human connection of engaging with work of those people I personally know. In general. Regarding famous names, this is where I could take more conscious influence, but it isn’t clear to me what famous poets out there I would feel an affinity with. I’m really searching for this. Who’s maybe the most famous poet you might name, who you feel writes poetry in a “school” of the most affinity with yours?

I’m less familiar with the details of poetry book publication. I understand there’s a form called chapbook. Off the top of my head, is it 40 poems are to be featured in one? Roundabout 2006 is when I started writing poetry. Found the voice I wanted around 2009. Stopped being primarily concerned with poetry as I conceived a novel, around 2012-2013, though of course still continued to write poetry. By then I’d written 100s of poems, but none were ever published. (Maybe for the better.) The first poem I ever got published happened in 2017. For some time I had the number 18 in my mind, and did determine I’d collect 18 poems written from 2021-2023, as “Thank Capitalism for Mental Illness!” The title riffs off the album “Thank God for Mental Illness” by The Brian Jonestown Massacre (1996). As I’ve watched that documentary “Dig!” from 2004 by Ondi Timoner a lot. The notion of the title expresses too I think, a general perspective of mine that’s a synthesis of anarchist anthropology and Reichian psychoanalysis.

I suppose I’m always in the mode of training, trying to get better at writing poetry. Where, a melancholy way of stating it might be, if I was ever remembered for writing one good poem, that could be enough. Practically I suppose I need to get another 18 out, but published in journals. Maybe wait till I’ve had 40 published. Then maybe that could enable a chapbook. If I didn’t get paid for it, that would be okay, because at this point I care more about being able to get the work out into the world so I can move on from it and continue to evolve. If the publisher couldn’t make any money off it, I would do it for free. But, if it was possible to make a little money off it, of course that would be nice. I haven’t read poetry books from fashionable writers since college when I didn’t ever really find one poet I felt much affinity with, and surely I need to be reading more what current poets are publishing and finding ones that, I do think, there could be a sense of community there. The idea I suppose would be to try to get to know them more, and to develop a better understanding of what publishers are out there. What the small press scene is like. Hope that answers to your questions, sorry these paragraphs were a bit of a ramble.

Regarding aiming at specific sites; yes this has been my philosophy. This is because I felt like what I needed to do was find a community. I believe that output is very influenced by input. My idea was I would want to get a sense of some journals out there I enjoyed reading, or which I felt might publish me. But then I also wanted to make sure it really would turn out a good use of my time. I suppose this is because when I took a look at the market about a year ago, I felt like being an anarchist might not be all that helpful to me in terms of finding venues for my work. There are venues that lean to the left, but then I often find these tend to be insular as they often reject anarchists. I felt like I needed to really search for a venue that wasn’t precisely political, but wasn’t only purely artistic either. It seemed like I would be trying to find a very particular type of publication that I feared might not even exist. I also got the sense that in the way the market works and with its slow turnaround, clearly I needed to find not only one publication that might not reject me, but many. This didn’t seem likely. But quality over quantity, yeah? Where in short it seemed what might be viable under such desperate conditions was to find a publication or publications that I might be able to develop a relationship with. Rather than only those which might publish a poem of mine as a one off. Again, this comes back to the idea of looking more for a community than necessarily publication itself. One desires perhaps, not so much the alienated success of career, but of the non-alienated existential affirmation, of an alternative way of having successfully survived our dire times.

So far it’s been a success because there have been results, although they have been different from what I would’ve expected! The practical metric for success in capitalism is being able to make a living, and I couldn’t be further from that. But I have been forced to focus on part of the field of writing that is structural and institutional, and not to do with the art itself, that has led to the development of an entire philosophy, counter to what I’ve found most repellent about the industry. My analysis was—I’ll never be accepted by this industry. But; “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Why do I need to focus on being accepted by it, so much as going entirely my own way from it? And then, who knows. As it has seemed to develop in these letters—that. . . maybe there would be other people out there who also saw things this seemingly misfit way that I did. . .

The dominance of algorithm is a problem that rules the day. From what I understand about Patreon, is that it’s a way creators get funds from fans but ultimately they still platform their work mostly on YouTube. Alternatives exist certainly but it seems as another Amazon problem; anyone small has to still interact with the Empire.

But, if I may, I want to digress on cinema for a moment. I was thinking about what you said regarding horror filmmakers being able to get to Hollywood through YouTube. My thought runs in two directions here. First is that using YouTube to get to Hollywood, seems the same idea of the means to an end to become rich and famous. I suppose I could’ve envisioned an underground of sorts where Hollywood no longer had to be an essential part of it. But here is the other direction my thought runs. Cinema always requires capital. That seems to be in part why Hollywood has always dominated. It became a solid model of being able to finance films, turn a profit, and throw that back into bigger and better films. It seems hard to picture how an underground of cinema could really get by without some solid income stream, again, simply due to the nature of cinema and the start up money required to bring any film project out of its written stage into its final filmed and edited, and completed stage.

The problem of censorship too is interesting. It’s a big pickle there, because I don’t think such a process, say, one of rating, should be automated. In fact, the idea that it could be strikes me as absurd. Except that so much content gets generated it also seems it would be impossible to moderate it with a solely human labor force. The problem may come down to how one construes control. I personally think that the truth is the best remedy for misinformation, alternative facts, distorted truths, propaganda, disinformation, what have you. But using this metric means letting people make up their own minds about content, and not having their minds made up for them in advance. What comes to mind is that phenomenon of boomerang effect, also I think it’s been called Streisand Effect, or my favorite way of stating it is the Cobra Effect. The idea, of cobra effect, comes from a British colonial policy in colonized India to try to deal with a cobra problem. The government decided it would pay for dead cobras. But what this incentivized was the creation of cobra farms where they were raised simply to deliver and get money, and not the control of a cobra population. In short, sometimes trying to control a phenomenon, can create opposite unintended effects to what one was attempting to control! I suppose I see the issue of censorship like this. Being into film history, I was always interested in the history of the Hays Code or Motion Picture Production Code that was in place from 1934 to 1968. There’s also a really great documentary about the inherent bias of the MPAA that came out in 2006 called This Film Is Not Yet Rated, I was always fascinated by. Censorship is tricky because it’s always going to result in privileging some bias. Not censoring may be comparatively messy, but I think when paired with a strong commitment to the values of philosophy or trying to get to the truth, as well as a sense of ethics about all other important related aspects, it’s really the better path to go.

When it comes to celebrity and fandom, I find they are as though Two Sides Of The Same Coin. The current manifestation is parasociality. One side requires the other. I reckon we’d be better off without a model of relationships which were so unequal like this. In parasociality, the fan is so desperate for a connection, but it’s only a surrogate for what that truly is. The creator also might be lacking in contentment or true fulfillment, to the point where no amount of followers might ever feel enough; or to know another creator has some thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands more, might drive a kind of pit of despair.

You mention Van Gogh. Well, if back to cinema, I grew up appreciating a lot of those films which might have flopped in their time, but were later recognized as classics, or cult classics, or ahead of their time. There are so many examples it boggles the mind, so forgive me for not really mentioning a specific one. But it’s so common I think it’s even a cliché. The film or work of art that was ahead of its time. There are many stories of established filmmakers or artists who took a risk somewhere along the line and their work flopped, and they were devastated. In some cases they never worked again. I suppose in this way I grew up with a bias towards the art itself (in this case, largely movies) over the situation in which it was received (perhaps a flop; critically or at the box office). Especially this would be when I hadn’t even been born yet to know those social conditions, so I was exposed to the pure result. And in many cases, a new reputation had been built up after the fact, of people rediscovering a film, or claiming it was great all along. And so many years after it had been so overlooked, there becomes a consensus, that hey, this thing was really great. For example I’m a big Kubrick fan, don’t know about you. He’s a quintessential example of a filmmaker whose work was often overlooked at the time it came out (he never won an Academy Award, for directing at least), but in hindsight his work is objectively of the highest quality imaginable.

“Submitting is always a gamble, but there are ways to increase your odds.” This seems a very concise way to put it. In this way, it also suggests that ultimately, if one puts one’s mind to it, one can end up finding some success. But transplant this to the domain of literary agents, that gatekeep the literary industry more broadly, and I don’t think this ends up the case. As you described it before as a kind of labyrinth, that is how I sort of came to see it. Or felt that, then, your metaphor put a good image to it. No, it didn’t seem like there in the end there was a way to increase one’s odds meaningfully. Like if one was already starting out with 1000000:1, and you make your odds go up to 100000:1.

Why is it like this?

Fascinating, I didn’t know about the Dutch system of Watershappening. The idea of a more democratic kind of structure being created by people, and put into practice, but, then later taken over or dismantled by a more top-down hierarchical power structure, however, is familiar to me as a historical pattern. You make a good point in differentiating the many differences in “isms” that often people who know less about their concrete differences, often lump all together as one. For instance, to me I understand the definition of socialism as democracy in the workplace, which is as far from Stalinism as one could ever get. Or, for me the definition of communism is a stateless, classless society, which again is as far from Stalinism, or Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union or say, in China, as one could ever get. And how you bring up about America being a Republic more along the lines of Rome. Here it is then interesting to note how, America is about as much a Democracy as the Soviet Union was ever a manifestation of Communism.

What you write about autobiographies contains a general truth more interesting than I usually hear talked about. Maybe it is also expressed in that cliché coined by Byron, that “truth is stranger than fiction.” It’s also here where it may come back around to ideas stated previously regarding drama, exploitation, and also art as therapeutic, or at the very least, a process more substantial than its vulgar commodification may pigeonhole it to be. I mentioned those hitmen, cops and robbers clichés, because of course, me too, after watching too many Tarantino films, these were the types of ideas I was trying to develop as a teen. Again it would seem to betray that the lives of average people are somehow less dramatic or substantial or interesting than those of totally fictional tropes or characters. There is also a cliché that is said to be a Chinese saying, but likely isn’t, and that’s a misnomer, but which is a curse that goes “may you live in interesting times.” Funnily enough, as youth we may seek out pulp fiction subjects for our writings because our lives may seem nothing in comparison, until we suddenly end up with so many life experiences it would become impossible to write about them all. Stated again in another way, a writer may at first lament the lack of drama in their lives, only to later suddenly have too much drama to know what to do with. A lot of times people with really extraordinary lives don’t get the opportunity to tell us their life stories, nor may their life’s work benefit them at all, as with Van Gogh. Capitalizing, on stories, on artworks, it strikes me, is the main idea I want to rail against, because I think our stories, everyone’s story, our artworks, are truths above and beyond being capitalized on.

“not stop until the ink in the pen of life has dried up.” That’s good stuff.

“There can’t be art without life, but there can be life without art, although it’s not necessarily a life I would enjoy living.” This is good. I believe that’s right, and I agree with it. Analyzing your concept, it seems to show it isn’t about ranking one above the other; they sort of need each other in a complex way.

“what is keeping people from fully imagining a world different from this one is people’s lack of will or inability to change. The status quo is the path of least resistance, and the will to change can only come from resisting to such established norms.” This is also really good and strikes me as right. I would add that I think our inability to change is also deeply ingrained in ways we aren’t fully responsible for. That is, we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves and others for it. But what I think might be generally true, is another concept expressed by David Graeber, that often culture develops as a process of resistance or refusal of a status quo. I think we are always stronger together and no wonder culture is always a collective process.

I can’t believe you’ve never thought about the structural analogies between film and poetry! Regarding narrative; that would appear more suited ultimately, for the short story or novel. Poetry with narrative is of course great. But think of a film in terms of how often it can tell a story through images alone. There are films that are of course dialogue heavy, that imitate plays. But when you add up all those elements that are specific to film like editing, composition, camera movement, mis-en-scène, a message ends up getting communicated above and beyond the basic facts of the story. In poetry I think you see a correlate there more than you necessarily would in a short story or novel, although of course short stories and novels can tend to the more expressionistic and less purely narrative. Overall I really think about how poetry is temporal like a piece of music, or indeed a film, and yet it can easily chop up chronology as you often might see in editing techniques. It’s possible to synthesize a number of elements together, images, feelings, in a disjointed way that can be very cinematic. Perhaps not all poets like to do that. I certainly do. But then wherever my stuff gets rejected, it seems to usually be with the vague rejection criteria of having been “unclear.”


CHRIS BUTLER: Chris Smalls is a figure of prominence in the largest unions across these United States, so with luck he will not be one who will be forgotten, but instead will stand as the first.

Interesting take on the notion of Jackson Pollock’s elevation in the art scene as a piece of American anti-communist propaganda. I never thought of it like that before, but now it seems obvious, as he was the patriarch of a style that was based primarily on the artist’s “freedom of movement”. But nothing would surprise me, even if Hemingway had been an intelligence officer for the West or the East, as he integrated himself into the two biggest wars on the European continent in the 20th century prior to WW2. Although the Russians and the Americans were allies by circumstance during WW2 (something too many people embarrassingly neglect), the United States had their first Red Scare in the 1920s, which is often overlooked because it didn’t have the spectacle of a drunken Joe McCarthy accusing Hollywood celebrities and coastal intellectuals of being the threat. One, however, must not forget that it wasn’t just the Nazis that crossed the border into Poland in 1939, as Germany and the Soviet Union split the country in half on the map long before Operation Barbarossa. The United States spent years isolating the Soviet Union from the West, most particularly in trade. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard the story of Pepsi’s Soviet Navy, but it is an interesting tale of how the #2 soft drink company on the planet managed to sneak their product through the Iron Curtain, and ended up receiving 16 submarines, a frigate, a cruiser and a destroyer from the Red Army in return. But it would be naive to believe that spies and espionage weren’t and remain as important to “national security” as they always have. Of course, the world of fiction has glamorized such a facet of both war and peace time, much like all other aspects of the military industrial complex from the factories to the frontlines.

But I agree, the idea of indoctrination is far more complex and nuanced than simply inheriting more than one’s genes from their parents, or being directly influenced by their ideologies. Of course, they were influenced by their parents, and the generation they were born, raised, came of age and grew old in. But in my understanding of the entire concept, there are elements that are ingrained in the subconscious, but there is also great effort put into parental or authoritative figures instilling their systems of dogmas into the next generation, as anyone who resists is often labeled as a trouble maker, a rabble rouser or a bad influence. This is not the universal case, of course, but it exists in the multitudes. They need good boys for their armies. But as someone who was raised with a combination of indoctrination balanced with intellectual freedom, it can be difficult to avoid the plague when you’re born into the era of the Black Death. But of course, once a certain level of intellectual maturity is achieved, these afflictions tend to be self-inflicted rather than inherited.

But I agree about your sentiments of media literacy. The options are just far too many that you can easily find yourself in the algorithm’s echo chamber, or a whole new rabbit hole of propaganda.

The issue with fascism and this new American era goes even further back the deeper one looks through the fossil record of human thought. The first, second and third “Great Awakenings” were all times where the nation adjusted to a drastic change in their ways of life with regression instead of progression. 2001 always seemed like the year when it all changed, but that may be just from our own perspective in the era where we came of age. But there were also tragedies like Columbine which changed the way we went to school forever, but is lost in the endless dark sea of mass shootings. People tend to forget, but the Patriot Act is still working hard to this very day to track and map our entire lives on a closed system of information. But absolutely, the decades preceding the last ten years have been drastically different. When one fopa would end an individual’s entire career, today even in the face of pure hypocrisy, contradictions and insanity, people hang onto their ignorance like it’s the edge of the highest cliff. I don’t get it. The issue with American culture and politics seems to circle back to those “Great Awakenings” that justified the violence that allowed the Puritans to sleep so soundly in the New World. People will justify genocide if it makes them a little more comfortable in life.

Co-writing poetry can be fun, and it also can help with seeing the piece from a different perspective. Of course, this requires a Partner in Rhyme who is willing to let go of their ego and be willing to allow their words to be entrusted in the hands of another. But, it is something I miss doing. But most of my experiences with poetry have also been from people I’ve come to know along the way. But there really aren’t a lot of famous names I read anymore, or read a lot of when I was first fooling around with the English language. My greatest influences in my poetry have mostly come from other mediums. Particularly, lyrical song writing would be the first influence I had in poetics. I would have to admit that Kurt Cobain inspired more of my words than Charles Bukowski ever could (and as my favorite “famous poet” to read, I could never see myself write in his style. He’s essentially influenced an entire generation of poets to write just like him, which takes away from the unique timbre one should hear when they finally find their writer’s voice). I may be a terrible example of someone who can be reflective of their influences, as someone who thought they were capable of creating his own form of formal poetry by the age of 22.

Chapbooks typically fall within the realm of 20 to 40 poems, whereas full manuscripts are closer to the 60 and over range. They aren’t necessarily a form, as most often they are utilized by poets who have some published poems and want to publish a manuscript but don’t have enough for a full-length collection. However, for myself and some others I know, they are used as concept books, where the individual poems tell a greater narrative when presented in a certain order (my first two books were only 12 poem chapbooks, “Emo” as a series of love poems, and “The War of Art” as a series of poems about writing poems, but I’ve continued the trend with all of my books). Not very groundbreaking, but it led to what felt like incremental growth as a writer, and it allowed me to do the same thing as you hope to do, which is get your words out into the world to move on to bigger and brighter pastures. It does take time and persistence to find the right publisher for the right poem, but when you do, it is a feeling that never tires no matter how much you publish. I hope it happens for you with stupendous success. But that 18 to 40 range would be a preferred number for most chapbooks from the perspective of most publishers. That’s a great reference with the title. I haven’t seen “Dig!” in years, but it’s impossible to forget The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The name alone is worth the price of admission.

But it’s good to keep oneself in the mode of training, as all of my early experiments in poetry found the trash bin until I found my voice. You never know when the next poem might come, and it could very well be the greatest thing which has ever been written. You just never know, and the immediateness and urgency with a limited amount of words can spark lightning in a bottle at any time. But I wouldn’t say being remembered for one poem would be a melancholy notion, as it depends on one’s own perspective of what defines success. Most would give just about anything for that one moment in the sun after a lifetime of cloudy weather.

I do also think it is more important to develop a community in the writing world than accumulating a long list of publishers. It actually makes the process far easier as more and more poems are written and sent out into the world. But as I mentioned before, sometimes it’s the publications you least suspect which will give them a home. Sometimes you just have to submit and see where it takes you. I wish I could be of more help with a list of publications, but even I haven’t found all of the homes for my words. Hopefully my suggestion of checking out the publication credits of poets you enjoy reading will bear a good harvest, without the necessary human sacrifice.

But it’s true. Sacrifices must be made for success. If you’re going to try to extract dollars from the market, one must at least venture beyond the entrance of the marketplace. But at least in writing being a salesman feels a little less contrived and cynical, because what you’re ultimately selling is yourself, and it doesn’t necessarily require selling out. But it is good that you are finding success. It can leave one downtrodden if they write and submit with “nothing to show for it”, but it is something that seems to be a universal experience with all writers, no matter how notorious.

That is one of the reasons why I decided not to pursue a career in the film industry, because it does require a lot of money to make a film. That’s why my favorite era for American film has always been the 1970s, when independent directors who remained relatively unscathed from studio interference were able to not only thrive, but essentially become the institution for decades. However, it may be the ripe time for a new cinematic revolution, especially after the “death” of the theater with Covid and the endless hundred million dollar blockbuster flops. Maybe this point in time will be the tipping point for studios to realize once again that it is far more economically feasible to release cheaper, independent films which accumulate a modest profit. The cult classics that were too far ahead of their time, or simply just didn’t have the word of mouth promotion, once had a solid place in the aftermarket of the rental industry. But it’s good to know that you are a Kubrick fan. He is my favorite filmmaker, and on the short list of my favorite artists. And it is absolutely ludicrous that he never won an Academy Award for direction, and even in death he wasn’t honored posthumously. As Spielberg said about 15 years ago, it’s too little too late for the Academy to get their act together regarding Stanley. They missed their chance after the new millennium and the Academy are the losers for it, much like the people who watched his films one time, never gave them a second watching, and just dismissed them due to their complexity. I used to pay attention to industry awards, but as the years have gone by, and looking back years before we were born, they have and keep getting it wrong in far too many cases to be of any relevance to real fans of film.

The biggest difference between Patreon and YouTube are the percentages creators receive from their views, likes, donations, subscriptions, etc. YouTube apparently is now taking about a 50% cut, while Patreon only takes 20%. So, for most creators on both platforms, YouTube is supplemental income for the edited down version of their videos (as so many creators are getting screwed over by “copyright strikes” as well as complete demonetization without reasons creating videos on subjects that involve war, violence or any sexual content, which pretty much harms nearly all history channels). Patreon also doesn’t have the level of censorship of YouTube. But I have seen “This Film Is Not Yet Rated”, I remember it being a good watch all those years ago. The MPAA and BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) and their history of censorship, cutting strips of film to shred to force a more viewer friendly rating, is also quite disturbing, but also interesting. So many iconic films which no one could imagine a scene, a character or a moment not being present most likely had multiple scenes or moments cut before they reached the final edit for theaters (the reason why they started releasing “Director’s Cuts” of movies in the VHS/DVD era). But yes, the rating system, certainly more so with the MPAA, is a really disturbing process to artists, but really should also be for viewers. The fact that a rating can mean the difference in so much money and exposure, and these powers are held by anonymous, unelected individuals who control the studio system.

But the current manifestation of the social media celebrity is a much more strange relationship than those celebrities who have little to no actual direct interaction with their fans (although many social media celebrities do not quite interact, they just post themselves talking into the camera, creating the illusion of an intimate conversation, even when there’s thousands of others listening in). Parasocial is the perfect word to define it.

In terms of submissions as a gamble, those words certainly do not apply to literary agents. The issue is most likely the amount of money which is involved in these decisions. Even larger presses which pay well for publication have less of a gatekeeping process than a literary agent who works with massive publishers. And I’m still not quite sure how much success a literary agent actually affords people who they sign under contract, especially in an era where someone can secure varying levels of celebrity outside of the realm of the pre-established media machine. I don’t know why it is like this either.

I also see socialism as more of the idea of democracy in the workplace, but for most people who don’t quite understand the differences between all of the different isms which were born out of Marx. They think it always entails a murderous dictator, strict state censorship and control, and complete loss of the individual. Unfortunately, the anti-Commie rhetoric is still alive and well decades after the Cold War. But it’s a great point, and I can’t help but agree: “America is about as much of a democracy as the Soviet Union was ever a manifestation of Communism”.

“May you live in interesting times” is a quote which often reminds me of chaos that people have fantasies of, but when they experience it firsthand, they wish the times were far more boring. But there is something about that most stories don’t need to be capitalized upon. But yes, take it from me, if your life has far too much drama that it could be a bestselling autobiography that the average reader would find “stranger than fiction”, then maybe the drama in one’s life is too much for one being to bear.

But yeah, the structural analogies between poetry and film is something I haven’t thought much about, although I have written a couple of poems inspired by the images of the screen. My last chapbook ended with a poem inspired by the scenes of “The Seventh Seal”. But of course, film is an artistic language that is told primarily through images, as there are an endless reel of iconic shots and images which will never leave my mind (Kubrick was the master of these images burned into one’s brain, in my opinion). But, the learning process is never complete in life, so that’s a whole new thing for me to consider.


A SCOTT BUCH: When you get the urge to write prose, say a concept for an essay, what is the first thing you do? The journals to which you submit poetry, are they often ones that also publish essays, articles, reviews, (etc.)? There’s a philosophy in Bukowski, of “Don’t Try;” a nihilistic perspective. Have you seen Sideways (2004), a great Alexander Payne film, about a writer with a book manuscript, that in the subtext of the narrative, never gets published? I recall a moment in the film, where its two main characters get reflective towards the end of the narrative. Paul Giamatti is the lead; he employs a metaphor of being, no more than human waste drifting out to sea. His friend tries to lift his spirits, telling him how poetic that expression was. But the Giamatti character then expresses that he’s essentially just ripped off Bukowski there. He couldn’t even come up with an “original” expression of nihilism. And that strikes me as a meta problem with the trap of nihilism in general.

Couldn’t it be interesting to write a critique of that notion of the unique writer, who later everyone ends up copying? Same as the idea that there’s an irony in how poetry today seems totally stuck in a cage of free verse? I do wonder if the dream of being a writer was always so subsumed in an atmosphere of nihilism. What ever happened to the phenomenon of schools, and movements, with art and, especially for us, poetry? I’m intrigued by what you mention about how, your “greatest [poetry] influences have mostly come from other mediums.” As much, if not more so, by the fact of, “most of [your] experiences with poetry have. . . been from people [you’ve] come to know along the way.”

To what extent have we all gotten collectively lost, in a delusion of atomized individualism, in which the best we could ever imagine is that, we’d all become rich and famous; and yet, at precisely the same time, we could never imagine it would happen at all—never in a trillion years—and hence, an overwhelming nihilism? We could become paranoid and jealous of each other on the one hand, mirroring, to some extent, exactly the type of divide and conquer strategy that ruling classes have always used, to keep those they rule over, from becoming united. Or, we could pool our strengths, and vital energies, and focus on generating movements of poetry, rather than mere singular identities!

Where is our New Beat Movement (that would of course, have a totally new term to describe it, rather than simply the repetition of an old one), rather than a long list of Bukowskians? Or Bukowskites?

The idea, that Poets would have more experience interacting with their peers, than other, out there, never to be interacted with, Celebrities, I think, speaks more to what is possibly that much more vital role for art to begin with—taken to its purest height, with poetry—and that is: It’s a communal experience. Art is a communal experience in that, it’s the way we humans make sense of our lives, as individuals, defined through a process of sharing our experiences with a larger whole that we feel ourselves a part of.

When I think on what you mention of chapbooks; that they are concept books, it makes me think of a number of things. The first goes back to what I just wrote about art as a communal experience. But it should also feed into a point I want to eventually go on to make, about an interesting irony, in that, I think one of the vital roles of art going forward, might actually be, to become a type of a process that works against fiction! Because, I do wonder, if anyone has ever sat down to write a poem, that wasn’t directly responding to some real experience that they’d had. One may set out to write a poem solely to comment on some aspect of apprehending beauty, but again I think this is always connecting right back to direct experience. One is certainly never starting out to write a poem, thinking that, well, what I’m doing right now, is part of a process in which, I’m about to make something that can be purely sold for money. This would be in stark contrast to most other art forms, that do lend themselves quite easily to commercialization. In other words, there seems to be something about poetry in particular, where overwhelmingly WHY one composes it to begin with, has something much more to do with the direct lived experience of reality—and LESS about those more clearly utopian creations, which are generated merely to make a profit on the market. In short, then, it would make sense why poetry lends itself more to a communal, or communicative experience. It’s meant to be a direct community process, where we are largely engaging with the work of folks we might indeed have a direct experience relating with. A primary exception would be with those who no longer occupy the realm of the living. But then, perhaps therein lies that mysterious beauty of why it can feel so transcendent when one may feel they are connecting with the soul of an individual who has long passed, but merely through the artful words they left behind.

I apologize if I’ve gotten a bit abstract in my Lettering here, but I can’t stress enough how much I think we need to revolt against, and escape out of, the paradigm of the Individual Rare Celebrity, and embrace a New Poetry Movement that was envisioning big how it might not swell into something that overthrew this system that had become so ossified and decadent that all it could give us was the same old boring nihilism.

Back to the chapbook as a concept book. Again, if we apprehend poetry as a very human experience in which we create our own understanding of ourselves and our reality, our history; it follows that each poem a person ever generated was, as such, always another ongoing part of the metaphorical—or in this case, Literal—chapbook of their lives. But, when we think of the poet more as a deliberate artist in the sense of a filmmaker, or novelist, or what have you, then, of course, we could see the deliberate process of composing one chapbook, as an exercise in using each separate instance of a poem to make a broader point within the whole of a collection. Why I want to bring this up, as problematic, within the shape of the industry, comes around to a concept I eventually came to grasp, once I started trying to figure out how one might make a living as a freelance writer. I came to understand the difference between making submissions, or writing pitches. In theory, the process of pitching an idea is an already much more collaborative process, than one of mere submission. Although it’s also true that the problem of pitching becomes very similar to submitting, in there being a lack of publications to which one even gets so far as to be able to pitch an idea. But, it seems with submission, it’s already set up in the very structure, that, the submitter and publication being submitted to, don’t necessarily even ever need to develop a more communicative, collaborative relationship. Why I’d relate this as a problem to a chapbook, is because, if one was going to go through the process of writing a whole book of poetry, well, it’s sort of like the problem of writing any whole book in general, say, a novel; because before embarking on that extremely long and arduous process, one would—in theory—want to guarantee that when the work was done one would at least see it published, and, get something back for what went into its production, namely, resources; but, if not money necessarily, than at the very least some sense of being able to continue on, such as in terms of like a career.

In pitching, one secures at least a kind of contract, even if only verbal, for such commitment in advance. Whereas with submissions the work is always composed in advance and in many ways, independent of any kind of prior relationship between the writer and publication. Finally; who could ever secure such a deal or commitment for a poetry book? I hesitate to say anyone? Anyone not within academia? Because, to state the problem again: If one is going to set out to deliberately write a big collection of poems that all fit together, the time it would take to write a book—as in my view, if we’re talking quality poems here; I think, it could take as long as one year to produce such a book—isn’t it a kind of bizarre leap of faith, that one would embark on such an operation, without some guarantee that one’s hard work would eventually pay off?

It’s clear for most artists and the overwhelming amount of poets, they devote themselves to producing what they produce, without any sense that it will ever be profitable. One silver lining here for poets again, is, unlike with filmmaking—as previously discussed—one can go ahead and simply produce the work, without taking on the extra financial risk of the material demands of cinema. But even in just the work coming out at all, this is where I suppose the literary agent comes in in a way which does make sense. In that case there’s this strategic force at least that can provide some assurances to the writer, say, before they might embark on the long process of creating a more complex work which could take as long as one year to a number of years to complete. That, when it was done, there was a basic guarantee that it would be figured out, how it was going to come out. Be published; be made available to read or purchase; be brought attention to. Although, to return to the film Sideways—brought up at the beginning of the letter—as I recall, in that film, the writer even had an agent but still they’d shopped the manuscript around to all number of publishers, and couldn’t find a way for the book to come out. As I recall, the film ends on a kind of, Life Is More Important Than Art, kind of mentality, that, even if no one had ever read the book, an intimate companion of the writer, I believe, had read it—perhaps the only person to do so—and, in that way, the whole struggle and experience was validated, even if not precisely as the writer would have desired, with, of course, that whole experience of, say, becoming as known a figure as Bukowski.

I hope I have generated some interesting domains in which this dialogue could continue, because at the same time I think while I’ve been able to get a number of concepts off the ground, I don’t think I’ve necessarily expressed them as clearly as I’d hope, or detailed as much of them as they probably require. But, it gives me hope to know that these ideas are ultimately being directed at another consciousness, so, to whatever extent something could resonate here, and you would pick up on it, possibly run with it, that would feel like a victory to me.

In particular, there was that idea of an art that worked against fiction, I might want to try to elaborate on, before concluding this letter. I might be able to combine it with keeping up a bit with some of the more historical and political elements which have been a part of our dialogue thus far? The idea of art against fiction, was elaborated on a bit in that sense, where I asserted there’s a way that poetry could play a role in the life of every human being, in how it’s like a universal process of making sense of our lives. This would be contrasted with the Utopia of Pure Fiction. For the most part, a democratic human use of poetry isn’t aiming to create utopias, whereas commercialized art for whatever reason, does seem to set out to do that; in the form of the dominant role of escapism. I’ve philosophized in solitude before over what I find is a hidden relationship between miserable political and economic conditions, and a predominance of escapism; they create a kind of interdependent vicious cycle, where people desire escapism more and more, because of how miserable reality is, but then, constant escapism serves to reinforce an apathy in which no one ever tries to alter what is so miserable about reality to begin with. But, there isn’t room to get into this here. I wanted to speak a little bit more about my novel; and how I think it might speak to some of what you were referring to, when you mentioned how the world of fiction can often serve to glamorize the military industrial complex.

My novel contains no elements of utopia whatsoever, though it does contain those necessary operations of the imagination in which, one distills a lot of patterns in one’s life, and reduces complex voluminous events, to their basic essences and archetypes, in order to tell a self-contained story, in which, it’s no longer fair to then call it true, but rather, a fictionalization of true events. At the same time, although it probably sounds grandiose of me, I took for a kind of model, what I understood the poet Byron did, when he wrote Don Juan, in taking the structure of an epic poem, to veil what I presume, was a lot of art inspired directly from real experiences. My idea was as he wrote a mock epic, to write a mock James Bond novel. Though the point was at every step of the way, only to take that structure as a conceit. It starts out in third person, a mode which lends itself to a somewhat objective way of writing fiction, especially where it’s clear the author is writing a character based on themselves. And while there are commonplace themes of deception and intrigue within the basic reality of the narrative, part of the poetic implications of the literature, is to attempt to get in conversation with spy tropes, to politicize them, in terms of how the authorial voice, or poet, one might say, treats of them. As the story unfolds it gradually shifts to the first person, in a move that mirrors the ways we come to understand some of the deceptions which ultimately structure much of the conflict of the narrative. The “spy” part then, always remains an obvious conceit, and thus is used to make social, cultural, and political critique—à la, as I understand, Byron was essentially trying to do with Don Juan.

How I’m trying to relate this to an idea of art against fiction is because I think a meta goal of the work, is to essentially probe a question I’ve been interested in since coming across it posed by Orwell, as the idea of what makes art different from propaganda. And the thesis would be that propaganda is fiction or the truth carefully modified with fiction, that nonetheless presents itself as if it were fact; whereas art is honest to you about the fact that it’s lying, and yet, in this way, can ironically tell a kind of “truth,” or demonstrate very objective ways that truth, as we often think of it, can be manipulated. Lastly, it’s often overwhelmingly played for humor, or a kind of satire, as the main qualities the protagonist would ever share with James Bond, are the mundane negative ones, like being a brutally hard drinker, or roguishness that results in a tortured relationship with a married woman. But there’s also a broader political parody I wanted to make in how the struggle of the protagonist essentially amounts to a little labor struggle, because, if you’re at all familiar with James Bond, or the Bond novels—or even the very reactionary, far right politics of espionage—Bond-type figures are often out to destroy left or labor revolutionary movements. There’s a classic Cold War paranoia or deliberate form of propaganda, which frames the organic movements from below, of oppressed people organizing to liberate themselves—even if, often alongside an ideology of Communism—as all dupes of some sort; all just puppets of some all-encompassing “Communist” Conspiracy. So I got a lot of poetic joy in making the protagonist an anarchist, because that’s the type of figure a traditional spy character would be working to undermine; and certainly would never be the “hero” of such story.

Does this relate to an idea of an art against fiction? I suppose I’ll leave that for you decide. I guess what I was trying to get at by bringing up my novel might be to point to how its James Bond pretensions, aim at deconstructing Cold War tropes when the US is in a Cold War II of sorts with China. I sometimes think this premise should make the novel very appealing to publishers; whereas other times I get the impression it’s the premise itself that would be keeping them away. I never can quite tell. Perhaps it’s in that same way it’s often easy to second-guess one’s work, when it gets so often rejected. You’d inevitably be plagued with an idea, like, is it me or is it them?


CHRIS BUTLER: If the urge to compose a piece of random prose, or any piece of creative writing, strikes me with the thunderbolt, I write. I focus on the process of creation, and then what will come of it after the creative process is complete is when the process of finding the homeless words a safe haven is underway. Some of those who publish poetry are also very accepting of other forms of creative writing (articles, reviews, essays, and all the rest). It certainly is a benefit to have previously worked with the editor of the site, but it is not a necessity with some. Bukowski’s philosophy of “Don’t Try”, at least in my interpretation of it, was less about a general artistic sense of nihilism than trying to force art from the mind through fingers suffering from carpal tunnel onto the page (but also, his general feelings towards life due to his insecurities). The concept of nihilism is very often misunderstood, even by those who feel nihilism in their nerves every moment of every day, so I agree that it has those trappings. I haven’t seen the movie “Sideways” since its release, so that would be something I would have to revisit to comment regarding specifics of the plot. My recollection of the finer details of the twenty year old film are as hazy as a wine country tasting (my first job out of college was at a vineyard and winery, so I know). But in actuality, many of the most famous artists have borrowed plenty of ideas from previous artists and have gotten away with it. And even many of those who didn’t get away with it were never given the Scarlet Letter of Writers and Scholars: P for Plagiarist. One generation always inspires the next, and the next, and so forth until one reaches the present.

But I would certainly say that it would be interesting to have critiqued a unique writer who becomes so influential they lead to generations of inspiration. And if anyone can write something new and unique regarding an artist who has already been critiqued by a seemingly endless list of writers and/or scholars, then they should get that idea out into the world for consumption in the marketplace of ideas. Not everything could be possibly said about everyone, and new interpretations exist all of the time. It has appeared to me from time to time that the notion of being a writer has been presented, through several stories, movies, and other forms of art, as a nihilist and the act and art of writing as nihilism. Possibly because so many famous writers have had successful pieces of art with general, baseline nihilistic themes that tend to transcend from the general populace throughout time. But I’m not sure what poetry exactly is in the university system at all, or if I would even be considered too honest and graphic for any substantial consumption.

My greatest artistic influences on my poetry have been from the world of music. The catchy melodies and lyrics of songs led to my art focusing on the music of words and the most difficult, and possibly most impossible, language in the world to master: English. I also have found influence and inspiration from plenty of other mediums, from the written to the visual, from the audible to the physical. But if I had been born with talent, I might have ended up a Punk. In the words of Kurt Cobain; “Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.”

But that would be the issue of movements. Often they don’t end in the direction where the originators intended. Maybe instead of a “Renaissance”, it would be an “Avortement”, or the “Neo-Naitre”? And also, sometimes the results of revolution attempting to break the chains of conformity just leads to a new form of Neo-feudalism, where those in the industry with any voice or influence would hold onto their positions of power without relinquishing control and profits.

Certainly before any creator makes a long term investment of blood, sweat, tears, cash and time, they would want the security of a guaranteed pay day at the end of it, as any laborer should (although the question of “labor of love” and artisans who do not seek nor expect fortune and fame from their hours of meticulous labor, or that even their hours will be fairly compensated, muddies the already murky waters of the “labor of love in equal exchange for money” argument). “Buy my book, even if you burn it”. But unless you have a pre-established reputation for being able to deliver a final product from a simpler original idea, or you have a unique situation which grants you an advantage over all of the rest of the artists with great ideas but no finished product (such as nepotism, connections such as “knowing the right people”, etc.), then from the perspective of the investor, they would need “assurances” that one is capable of making such a delivery before those who invest their funds into such projects will be willing to part ways with their cash. Unless one goes the route of complete self-publication and promotion, one must be able to convince those who sign the checks to trickle the wealth down the artistic food chain. But once your reputation for producing pieces that people are willing to pay for is established, then I would suppose it gets easier (I’ve only ventured on the lowest rungs of freelance writing and nothing near where a substantial and meaningful amount of dollars were being exchanged). Ideas are the basis and the process for all creation, but I’m not sure if it’s an industry saying or not, but every Hollywood producer and New York publisher are known to have drawers full of unfulfilled ideas; proposals, samples, scripts, etc. And only the slimmest percentage of these ideas reach the final iteration of creation.

My application of creating a narrative that is formed through the order of poems is not something I attempted nor intended from the beginning, it resulted after having a significant amount of published poems that were being organized into a book format, and during that process creating an overarching narrative thread through the order in which the poems were presented. Others may venture into creating a chapbook with an overall concept already in mind, but I did not, so it wasn’t as if it required much additional work or focus. “Emo”, the chapbook of “love poems”, was organized with the poems placed in the order of how a typical relationship would progress, from the desire of finding a significant other (in this case, a young male seeking a young female), through the process of “love/lust at first sight”, courting, to dating, and then to the downfall of the relationship. “The War of Art”, the chapbook of the story of an artist’s life from death to birth on the page, began with analogies of the creation of life with the creation of a poem, then the creative struggles as the poet ages, ending with the symbolic death of the writer, in the form of the final written words of too many writers; the suicide note. But the overarching narratives of these books were not initially intended when writing each of the poems. I know other artists who approach chapbooks by developing the concept first and attempting to fill in the pre-established gaps in order to fulfill that vision, but that is not how I’ve approached any of my books, which all have their own additional layer of an overarching narrative that can be seen by peeling back the initial stink of my creations.

But I’m not sure what else more I can add regarding securing some monetary guarantee without having a pre-established relationship with a publisher, or at least one example that a creator can bring an idea to fruition into a completed work of art because of a prior, fully-completed work of art on one’s resume. I guess the best way to look at it is how anyone enters the workforce in the Western world. Anyone looking for a job, unless they are entering the bottom rung of society’s necessary labor with zero work experience, isn’t very likely to get a job with a satisfactory wage without that prior experience, the educational background and/or impressive references. Years ago I realized that nearly all of the jobs I’ve had in my life, from my first minimum wage, part time high school gig to my current profession to pay the bills, I had been hired because of references. Knowing people who have some semblance of trust with the employer who vouches for one’s work ethic and dependability, at least before the internet completely took over the job searching and application process, was the most effective avenue to securing a job, even more so than previous experience or academic credentials. So, I guess if you look at the world of the arts and creative writing, most of us start out at low paying, labor intensive jobs in order to prove to the corporate world that we are capable of showing up to work, being on time, and being capable of submissively following simple instructions and demands. However, if a writer shows up with a completed manuscript, that would be proof that the writer is capable of writing a variety of poetry, or a complete fictional narrative, which appeals to a variety of publishers, and their audiences. If one were to present a publisher with a handful of unpublished scribbles on scraps of paper, it would take a great leap of faith for that publisher to assume that the writer would be capable of completing a full book of poems if they’ve never accomplished even the bare minimum of a single individual publication before. I’m not sure if this is worth posting, but the best way I can logically approach the subject from the perspective of one who’s still under that glass ceiling and major publication.

There are numerous examples of writers taking the plunge and taking a great risk with their future financial security for their young family or themselves by focusing on their craft of writing and improving until they began earning a living. Kurt Vonnuget was working as a Technical Writer and publicist at General Electric, a steady paycheck with the help of his brother’s nepotism, and because he had only published a few short stories at the time with Colliers, his first novel was only a minor success. But, the publication of his first novel enabled him to establish the beginning of his legacy. And it would still take several years and several more novels for him to achieve success with “Slaughterhouse Five”. Hunter S. Thompson lived on pennies in Puerto Rico with his young wife and child, practicing writing “The Great Gatsby” on his keyboard so he could hear what it was like to write an American classic, until he began writing his own. And then there’s Bukowski, who barely wrote until he retired from the United States Postal Service at 55 years old with a full pension and retirement, meaning he didn’t have to depend on any money that poetry or short stories would afford him. There are many famous writers of the modern era who began from the very bottom of oppressive boots and worked their way to the top, with no guarantee that the time spent would be reciprocated with monetary success.

It’s possible we may be glorifying the role of the literary agent in the modern world, where someone can go Viral, and instead of death and poor health, one becomes an overnight sensation with the one true marketing ploy which has worked throughout human history…word of mouth. Maybe we don’t need the literary agents as much as we’ve been led to believe, and they are already the fossils of a bygone era.

I would reiterate that the greater challenge, and concern, for writers would be finding THE right publisher, not just A publisher. Because even the greatest story ever told can become unread and unheard when entrusted to the wrong promoter and distributor.

But one could argue that the two purposes of all art throughout human history have been the passing down of morals and memes. The initial purpose of storytelling, which would later become the written word, was to pass on what has been learned from previous generations onto the next (not necessarily the rules for survival, but also tales of morality, courage, heroism, etc.). As our physical makeup is passed down from generation to generation through the procreation of our descendants’ genetic material, ideas need to be passed down through the use of communication and language. But in terms of art created for the purpose of escapism, it has risen to prominence both in times of growth and prosperity, as people have more disposable income and disposable time to spend on buying the ticket and taking the ride, and in times of decay and depression, as people have that need to escape the reality of the world around them.

Your novel sounds like an interesting concept. Has anyone else besides yourself or potential literary agents read it? It sounds like a book that would go over the heads of the average literary agent, especially since the average ones only focus on books that appeal to the “widest” possible audience, which usually involves middle-aged housewives/husbands, young adults and children’s books. But, that’s why I would recommend bypassing agents and instead focusing on publishers who do not require an agent, especially those who publish books with similar concepts or themes (non-traditional spies, dystopian societies, political fiction, etc.). If they have published multiple titles in a similar genre, I would hope they would take a greater consideration towards your book.

I’m not sure if this would be an example of art against fiction, as you have described it, as it seems to be an artform working in unison concurrently with a standard fictional narrative to create something unique and new. Although one may deconstruct tropes, themes and even language, they still must be remade into something new in order for the story to be told. But all writers have their doubts when going out on the limb of submission and the branch breaks, but we keep picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and climbing that daunting tree again. If it’s something for which you have belief in its merits, then one can never surrender on a story (so many famous writers have had their first attempts at novels published long after writing the story which gave them fame). Who knows how many times Byron felt such doubts…


A SCOTT BUCH: I’d argue MR. WANG moves in the direction of an art against fiction, because it isn’t the narrative that hijacks the standard spy story. Traditionally, if I were a writer of pure fiction—like those who write superhero stories—I could write a standard spy story if I wanted to. One would start by reading a ton of spy fiction, to where one understood the genre in and out; one would then pair this with research into actual espionage. Finally, one uses their imagination. Writers of pure fiction also, of course, insert a lot of reality into what they’re writing; parts of their personality, and what have you. But, ultimately, the narrative and genre conventions remain fully embedded in a logic of pure fiction. In my novel I’ve done the polar opposite. I’ve in every way attempted to keep the narrative, characters, setting, completely real and based on real events. Furthermore, the elements of being an exposé and critique of the ESL industry, are completely informed by real elements of that industry, and thus, it is a real critique of that industry. The story’s primary conflict is a labor struggle, and that is because I did in fact resist the precise working conditions I was under in more or less the exact same fashion as the protagonist does.

Core to the novel are political, philosophical and psychological elements, but what drives the narrative forward beyond equally important romanticism and eroticism, I believe is its humor. Much of this arises out of external factors, or that is, humor based on real events and experiences. However there’s also an internal humor—and critique (satire)—which develops as the novel gets further and further in—when enough has happened and enough symbolic and thematic groundwork has gotten laid, that the Poet or Speaker can start to make certain analogies or conceits, which take as their semantic kernel, not only Spy Tropes necessarily, but also a basic political Cold War “Manicheaism.” So for instance, what starts out as a critique of corruption in a mundane industry, later broadens such a critique to see a baseline corruption in all of capitalism. Moreover, what might start out as the general prejudice that China is an authoritarian menace, would eventually open up to critique all nation-states, and especially, the American Empire, as deeply authoritarian as well, although in ways which are ultimately a bit more “hidden.”

There’s a lot of doubling going on, both in the narrative and the inner symbolic logic—as one might expect—to the extent that how much the traditional reader might want to read the story as having clear cut Good Guys and Bad Guys, would also require said reader to do some self-reflection, and really consider exactly who they would be aligned with in the logic of heroism and villainy in the story, were they to apply its symbolic logic to their own ideological convictions and material allegiances. Why I ultimately see the whole as being “against fiction” is because it attempts to break down a lot of indoctrination and ideological biases that the standard American (and Western) consciousness would likely have. It also reflects in this way my own such internal journey along the same lines.

In the process of reaching the final draft I had feedback on drafts along the way. But in terms of the final draft I’ve ended up with, unfortunately whether or not it is, in toto, a fine work or a flop, is sadly irrelevant to the max; if one can’t convince those with the power to publish it, and get it platformed (essentially, one and the same thing), that they should invest time, reading one chapter, let alone its 185,000 word entirety. What this means is the hierarchical structure of everything dictates—without connections, as you said, or other forms of leverage—that the only way to get anywhere near such a point, where power might even read the first sentence, or first chapter, or first major section, or the whole, is, through the strength of a pitch or query alone.

This is one of those very arbitrary and ultimately to the degree we accept it, masochistic, aspects of the structure which I have brought up before; in the context of my attempt to work in opposition to it.

Constantly trying to come up with better and better ways of pitching a work that one has already completed, can often feel like one of the most pointless operations of reinventing the wheel over and over again that one can possibly imagine.

So, I find it an interesting irony, because, back when I only had a draft, and a clear road map for how I would turn it into a fine piece of completed art; I realized I could spend all my time trying to convince someone to contract me, before I’d actually completed the work, or, I could simply go ahead and complete it based on my own initiative. Although, even if one does this, one is still stuck powerlessly before The Gatekeepers, who one still needs to convince, in such a pitching format, that they should read the first sentence, first paragraph, first chapter, first section, etc.

Perhaps similar to the idea of a poet ritualistically submitting poetry to The New Yorker, with some general assumption they may be met only with rejection for their entire life, my idea was to exhaust querying as many literary agents as I could, and, to query to the best of my abilities, even assuming that ultimately, I would never find representation. I’ve always assumed the best route to go would be to find an independent press that’d find some affinity with the project and what it aims to do, which could probably do the project justice by putting it out on a label, so to speak, which really believed in the project, and felt it could succeed in getting it out to its proper audience.

Proceeding in this direction, it’s funny that you put it, “if I had been born with talent,” in regards to punk music. I was going to ask, if music and lyrics were your primary poetic influence; if you hadn’t rather attempted to go the route, of being a musician or being the lyricist or singer of a band.

As, speaking of punk, the whole point of it is democratization.

As the legend goes, in the formation of The Sex Pistols, it was the basic defacing of a Pink Floyd shirt to read I HATE Pink Floyd, that formed their genesis. This at a time when the professionalism afforded by capital invested in gear, had created a division between who could start a band and who couldn’t. Hence the punk ethos was born out of a deliberate strategy to try to level the playing field by making an intentional aesthetic out of amateurism. To this day, I remain interested in this idea, and it’s probably one of the prime organizing concepts behind my insistence on being against neurotic perfectionism in art, and especially the kind of justification which gatekeepers would often apply in ruling out a lot of more amateur work, on the basis of it not being quality enough. It’s the idea of a literary hierarchy being likely less about quality control, and more precisely about control itself. Which isn’t to say that elite standards don’t produce or result in aesthetic excellence; it’s to challenge that as a sole metric of aesthetic judgment, and, to also point out that often an insistence on aesthetic excellence, can sometimes be a way of marginalizing content, or, can become a rationalization or justification for producing and reproducing hierarchies within the arts.

And, to center the “issue of movements,”in looking at punk; it seems it was precisely responding to this issue; in what it saw happen to the Sixties counterculture. It saw that had gotten co-opted, so it seems it much more deliberately tried to build aspects into its structure—its basic anarchism, say—to defend against that ability of the status quo, to co-opt movements. Yes; the aesthetic of punk was co-opted. But I would argue its spirit—that of an authentic anarchism—cannot be co-opted. This is its strength.

I think the status quo understands—and perhaps this can even be seen in the basic definition of “co-opt” itself—that all it has to do is find those elements of a movement which do want to become its spokesperson, and, this will start the process, of draining what was once an authentic movement, of its once authentic content. In essence, the process of co-optation—at least, if we’re thinking of it in the narrow, basic problem of about, the last one hundred years, in terms of art/cultural movements—is one of taking an organic non-hierarchical movement from below, and structuring it into a hierarchical, artificial, representation of what it used to be. There is the same process although in politics, and not art, in how, for instance, a revolution can become a New Feudalism. If you ask me, this is exactly the ground on which anarchists and socialists disagree, regarding what a revolution is. Anarchists, for example going back to the Bolshevik Revolution, are the first to point out, that there’s real danger in rejecting the principle of means/ends unity (if you want a free society, one can’t arrive at that, through domination and exploitation, for instance); that a revolution can easily turn into the same old tyranny, just with a new coat of paint and different masters.

Maybe here is where to focus on influence briefly. If we’re talking about art, but probably the same could apply to politics; certainly the present will take influence from the past. Be it collective art movements, or individualist artists. At the same time however, sometimes it isn’t influence from the past, or present, that generates movements, but rather opposition. For instance, the notion of punk growing out of opposition both to how the Sixties counterculture failed, as well as the upper-class indulgence that was generally epitomized in the overproduction/pretentiousness of say, Pink Floyd. But to return to inspiration; I think there’s also a difference between Inspiration, and Imitation. What precisely is the difference? This is an apt philosophical/aesthetic question. I suppose to me I view imitation as being a particular Western problem; as in the Western philosophy of art, novelty is so prioritized that you end up with cults of individualism, that, ironically, end up becoming cults of imitation. I suppose this might be what I was getting at with that notion of a critique of how everyone imitates Bukowski.

Inspiration is something freer, more open; I would contend. Perhaps putting it strictly materially; it is those who insist on the singularity or singular novelty of their work, who may become MOST vulnerable to being merely imitated or copied. Whereas, perhaps, those who are more open and free with their influence, and potential to influence, are less restrictive in terms of trying to so obsessively copyright or take ownership over intellectual property? For, how ironic is it, that the owners of intellectual property, so often end up being precisely not the creative force behind a work of art. Not to mention that those who end up having the most influence over how the art turns out, are probably more aware of how collaborative the process can end up being?

I suppose in all honestly if you think about it, the problem of nihilism—to move to that—hasn’t really been with us for that long. It could be that modern humans have fully absorbed the problem of nihilism, with which most of our well-known modern and post-modern writers have fully grappled. I think it is to some degree a cultural problem, as the general concept can be grasped in a fully positive sense, as the fact that we are responsible for generating our own meaning.

I’d like to take a look at this imperative, “Buy my book, even if you burn it.” And the logic, but also material reality it represents; in continuing to speak of nihilism. That is, the tough fact that we’re responsible for the generation of meaning. One argument might be that there is a concrete material fact of nihilism, which the materialism of capitalism attempts, and fails to fill. But I would go deeper and suggest, it’s actually this capitalistic (and state) structure which is primary to a feeling of nihilism. “Buy my book, even if you burn it,” I would argue, reflects the paradox of “content.” It’s the paradox that, by turning everything into “content,” ironically, the actual content of “content” no longer matters. I think it’s the direct perverse result of making money the ultimate determiner of value, probably everywhere; but in particular for our concerns, in the domain of art; aesthetics. Because due to the logic and reality, that, a work making money is infinitely more important than what that work is trying to say; it leads to such a present in which the domination of quality by money/“content,” is what’s really draining content of qualities that would more traditionally be what we associate with those feelings of, that it “mattered.”

Exploring this concept further but still centered in the context of art/aesthetics, another aspect of the problem is correlated I think with how we as a culture view “work.” You bring up the concept of necessary labor, and I think a good place to start is how, on the one hand, we expect that society’s necessary labor, must largely be performed by those who are being coerced into doing it; and furthermore, that to a certain extent, the more necessary the labor, the less those who are being forced to do it, should expect to get paid to do the labor—which is truly horrific and absurd, when you stop to think about it. Although since we’re talking about art here, this lends itself well to emphasizing that distinction between necessary versus surplus labor. We confuse these; or have had them both wrapped up together, in one deceitful package, so to speak. See, I think that construing art, as fundamentally, only useful as Entertainment, or Escapism, is a direct consequence of this intertwining of necessary and surplus labor; as mostly a function of obscuring the basic exploitation at the heart of our consumer society.

Where a good or simply decent society should start in my view, is from a premise of autonomy. But for it to be a true autonomy, it must also be correlated with an equality of relationships.

A good or simply decent society must start from a concept of society in which both individuals and society have autonomy over how they perform not only their surplus labor, but especially, and, most obviously, their necessary labor. If we start from the position of necessary labor being represented through an abstraction like money: First; this is the primary aspect which I think is deceitfully, or in ways we have lost control over, confounding, the necessary with the surplus, or, what we need, and what we desire. And second; that this abstract structure becomes primary to our autonomy; the autonomy of both the individual, and society, ultimately becomes subjugated to it. Finally we end up, as I’d argue we do, with an unnecessary paradox on our hands, in which, we see it as an impossibility, that people could be, both free or autonomous, AND not hate what they do “for a living.”

If art isn’t free; then you end up with a kind of Stalinist “socially-valuable” art, in which only those who are the best at art, and who can demonstrate that their artistic abilities and products serve a “socially-valuable” cohesive unit, will be able to do it. But I would suggest only if we are still using money as the sole metric of what is “socially-valuable.” I’d argue that an autonomous pursuit of art becomes socially-valuable precisely to the extent that autonomy is essential for a healthy individual, and; that there is a direct correlation between healthy individuals, and a healthy society. I’d argue for a different way of seeing value which points out that perceiving value as only a function of economics, is, not only but one perspective; but which is also ironically, certainly not—as it would likely contend—a purely objective way of measuring or determining it. In art, all this basically means, is that we’re trapped in a paradigm of conceiving of value in aesthetics, as ultimately only a function of what it goes for on the market. And so; my philosophy would aim to be in clear opposition to that domineering paradigm.

Here the role of Literary Agent enters in. Are we glorifying them? Certainly not; we simply understand the degree to which, we are “at their mercy.” You’ll have to forgive the way this letter has really cut out on an unforeseen path, but I suppose I don’t think the problems here are trivial ones. Especially for poets/writers/artists. In a culture that has such an ideological way of construing work, and especially art, to the extent where, everyone suspends their determination if a book is really a book, (or if art is really art) until it gets verified through a managerial process, such as, being accepted, and published, by an authoritative press. . . The truly odd thing about it is, although it would seem as if it’s this process which secures the “ontological” status of a book or artwork; that, in other words, a book isn’t really a book until it has been published; that art isn’t really art, until a very wealthy person has been convinced they should buy it. When you stop to think about it, it’s philosophically or objectively, incorrect or artificial. For instance, let’s return to your idea of the writer with a resume, versus the writer with only handwritten scraps of paper. One could imagine a situation in which a resume doesn’t actually give a very accurate picture of the reality or quality of one’s work, whereas scraps very well could ultimately contain work of a “Van Gogh” level of aesthetic merit. Point is, objectively, it’s of course possible. It follows that the inherent quality of an aesthetic product, isn’t in any essential way determined, by if it has been officially recognized, say, in published or resume form; as compared to if it remained in a sort of raw potential as scraps in the bin, say, or like Kafka’s manuscripts, which his friend Max Brod refused to burn, even though Kafka had requested it. The point is there is a degree of politics going on, in the degree to which certain gatekeepers like literary agents, or establishment presses like The New Yorker, would have the basic power to determine, “ontologically,” the status of a poet, or writer. It is to some extent, the same basic aesthetic/philosophical problem, of wondering to what extent a poem published on an established platform, versus one that was self-published, really alters, or changes its status “ontologically.”

Lastly, I’d contend that the structure of virality, is ultimately determined by the same or a similar dictatorial logic as informs what traditionally gets platformed; to the extent that the internet was essentially captured by the corporate structure of big business. In other words, there’s no reason why a more free and open “virality” couldn’t be possible, which could in theory overcome the dictatorial structure of traditional gatekeeping, but, it would require an entirely different state of the digital world, more akin to how the internet was say, before its social media-like transformation.

I see that transformation being on the one hand, a representation of that problem of “content,” brought up earlier, but also in a structure to the internet now that I have a vague oppositional concept to, being, an Anti-Sell Profile. Similar to the way we might see content as a kind of automated, self-exploitation; so too might one find in the social media-like corporate structure of our current internet, forces which produce certain effects on the identity that makes people either more prone to the coercion of conformity, or to a neurosis of negative self-image that is the other side of the coin of a covert narcissism. One thus altogether, might see the domination and exploitation by “Content,” and Profile, as a structural problem that might be overcome, in an “Anti-Sell Profile.” Or really, it doesn’t matter what one might call it. Point is: It would be an attempt to resist and form a culture of resistance to, the logic of exploitation and domination that has infiltrated into our very identities, to the extent that our current technologies have an intimate determining effect on our mental health, careers, sociality, and beyond.

Not an “Avortement,” because The Movement chooses to live; it also probably could be bold enough to not have to worry about repeating a cliché as badass as “The Renaissance.” No idea what it would be called. That’s probably one of the more finishing touches which comes later. The main point for me would be it was meaningfully in opposition to the status quo; to what we have now. “Meaningfully” in opposition, and so, not in name or style only. But in its Content. A tough obstacle to overcome, in a world in which Making All Content, Has Drained The Meaning Of Content Entirely.


CHRIS BUTLER: The last thing the literary world may need at the moment is another traditional, fictional story which checks all of the preconceived boxes of a genre, so it’s good to hear you took it in a completely different direction, as that should be more likely to garner you more attention than just another spy novelist looking to be the next version of Tom Clancy. But the old idea of good guys and bad guys is just that; an outdated concept. You can see it in many works of fiction where the protagonist of the story is a character with loose morals and illegal actions, and the antagonist often doesn’t fit the role of the mustache twirling villain tying a damsel in distress to the railroad tracks. Also, books that tend to have those many different levels surrounding the narrative, such as doubling, contribute to the likelihood that the story can be read and reread and analyzed by generation after generation, exposing new ideas or connections that were never intended by you, the author, and may become more relevant to reality in the future.

But have you considered submitting individual chapters of your novel to publishers? There exists no shortage of literary journals looking to publish novels one chapter at a time (it used to be a very common practice, as many famous books of the 20th century began with publications of the first few chapters, or every chapter, in magazines or journals, and then were picked up by a publisher who then published it as a whole). That could be a rocky road worth rolling down, or at least giving it a gander. At least extending your tentacles out into the black abyss just to see if you can garner interested publishers may help. But maybe it is destined for a smaller press, or maybe a legitimate small press writing contest, as there are plenty who offer a few thousand dollars for publication (although be leery of some contests, as there are some shady ones out there…just last year I entered a poetry contest for the first time in 15 years, and the winner was a poem which was literally a list of Chinese names written in Cantonese). It can be disheartening when Gatekeepers block one’s access to the Kingdom, especially when something created with such care is rejected repeatedly. But we must never surrender.

Hopefully things will begin changing for the better for writers, as AI becomes a greater and greater concern to those who hope to live and thrive off the works of their written words. Hopefully both of our first true novels will find a good home with a solid roof over our heads and a warm meal at the end of the day, since we have these basic needs as well.

But I’ve been saying that if I was born with any talent I would have been a Punk since I was a teenager, and especially when I began experimenting with Word Music in my late stage teenage angst. I will always be a punk at heart (not the slang definition of the word at the time which was a man who chooses to become a homosexual in prison, mostly for the reason of protection, which is why the earliest American Punk bands and writers/journalists didn’t like the association with the term). I suppose I simply incorporated my punk spirit into poetics. Maybe I could have been a songwriter if I wasn’t a terrible singer who had a natural talent towards music, but my talents led me down the path of the quiet and isolated writer, listening to the melody of the clicking keys whilst creating words which combined together on the page form a musical quality using the sounds and timbre of the tongue-lashing English language. But I completely agree with what you said regarding why Punk continues to live on, despite essentially being created and destroyed by the mainstream media within a single year, 1977. Of course, that year is not on Punk’s gravestone, as it was born long before, and truly never died (as was always the case with the music industry, once a type of music became profitable, it was squeezed completely dry, such as the many musicians who joked that after The Sex Pistols hit it big across the pond, every record label were signing bands who only had a handful of live performances to lucrative contracts). But there’s so many classics, bands and artists still left to be heard while my eardrums can handle the decibels, and new oldies to discover everyday.

I think there is an old saying somewhere out there that once a movement reaches the conscious awareness of the mainstream populace, it has already run its course, because it has been taken out of the hands of those people who helped make it authentic enough to be co-opted by the general population and usually into those who are only looking to exploit the monetary opportunities of a “trend”. They are often far too late and rarely ever early to the party.

But it seems to be a fine, delicate line between plagiarism and inspiration, and artists tow that line all of the time. And I also see inspiration as something freer, as a single word or line can inspire a writer to create an entire narrative. But I would agree that those who develop a specific style that they never stray away from are more likely to be copied, since there are no surprises, or left turns to surprise the reader and keep them guessing what the next words will be. I guess it comes down to the mentality of the individual as to how they approach their ownership over their intellectual property. Some artists will claim copyright strikes against anyone and everyone who has even a parallel thought, while others do not care whether or not people “rip them off” so to say. I have always been under the impression that once an artist releases his art into the world, it no longer belongs to the artist, but the people (not in terms of copyrights and intellectual property, but in the fundamental purpose of sharing one’s art with the rest of the world).

I would concur that the problem of nihilism is that too many people believe that everything and everyone has to have a purpose, even if it is ultimately purposeless. Any meaning is better than no meaning. As Nietzsche said, the will to will is better than remaining in place, even if that will bring those to a place of suffering; “…man will wish Nothingness than not wish at all”. But the line; “Buy my book, even if you burn it” reverts back to a very early work in my career of a poem called “Burn This Book”, in which the second line, reads after the title is repeated; “…and forget you ever read it”, referring to the vast amounts of disposable content that we subject ourselves to on a consistent basis that you referenced, as well as the issue of capitalism’s effects on art when the previous counterculture had the idea of Steal This Book. But there remains that dividing line between those who write only for the accumulation of content, and those who write for a “higher” purpose…something they regard as work that “matters”. And of course, artwork that “matters” has the capabilities of causing actual change socially, politically, philosophically, scientifically, legally, etc. But the art that “matters” can also be used as a form of escapism and/or entertainment for a populace, just like the disposable content is.

There are seemingly endless paradoxes in the notion of autonomy and equality in this western civilization as it is constituted today. Sometimes the systems are established to create a separation which makes equality impossible, and sometimes the systems are changed over time by those who wish to exploit those whom they believe on a fundamental level are beneath their elevated stature. And sometimes it takes the interference from a centralized agency to cease inequalities created within the system by those who seek to exploit it, and sometimes they are the ones who cause such inequalities to exist and enable those who exploit. But freedom is important to the essence of the human being. Those who have spent any amount of time in solitary confinement, whether behind bars or behind the locked doors and windows of their own mind, know it is terrible for the mental and physical health of the self.

Sadly, the internet wasn’t captured by big business, but given to them, in one of the most consequential pieces of legislation to ever come out of one nation’s governmental body: the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (as a communications major, this is essentially the basis for the entire future of the field of modern communications). But of course, before the Act, the internet wasn’t a bastion of freedom and speech, but a tightly regulated system only afforded to a select few. It could only be accessed and utilized by government agencies and universities, as the initial purpose of the Internet was to allow intellectuals and officials quicker and more efficient access to information (such as a scientist who needed to refer to a prior study that only existed on the hard drives in the library archives of another university across the country). But the Internet truly evolved from the chat rooms to social media to make human connection more efficient, but has also created a system of creators, technicians, algorithms and webmasters who have control over the flow of information. But, I couldn’t agree more with the longterm and shortterm effects that social media platforms have on the minds of people, from the young to the elderly. Unfortunately, watching senior citizens who work far beyond the age of retirement in government trying to understand how much the basic flow of information, and who possesses that control over the information, has fundamentally changed beyond what their minds can comprehend. It certainly doesn’t help that those people “in charge” (many of whom are unelected officials who habitually cross the line of basic morals and legalities) have continued with the perpetuation of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies to continue to scare the populace into either submitting to their overlords, or those who can be molded into mindless perpetrators of their goals (inaction versus overreaction). But, the most important aspect which needs to be fundamentally changed is the operative-level amount of spying and lack of privacy that occurs through the data collection and sale of our own Selves, following us every step of the way in our electronic lives. But for now, ours remains an age of advertisement and publicity, not of revolutionary action and creative change, and it has been this way for a couple centuries.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with a name as memorable as “The Renaissance”, so I could only muster the bipolar opposite of the original European era of “rebirth” where Europe’s greatest artists were “coerced”, as you might say, to paint and create art featuring only Biblical figures and stories. I sometimes wonder what Michelangelo would have created if the subject matter of all of his art wasn’t controlled by the Holy Roman Catholic Church and The Pope. But, a second “rebirth” or “The Reincarnation” may be the way to allow meaningful words to impregnate the populace who have been discontent over the meaningless content that one must sift through on a daily basis to discover real truths.